


The Road Not Taken: Postcards

by fadeverb



Series: In Nomine: the Company [8]
Category: In Nomine
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-07-16
Updated: 2015-08-01
Packaged: 2018-04-09 13:39:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,522
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4350881
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fadeverb/pseuds/fadeverb
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which daily life occurs in a variety of places, between all of the more exciting and plot-filled things that happen in the other stories of this series.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. In Which Nothing Of Significance Occurs

Theft has this weird relationship with the Wind. I mean, not with Wind itself, because fuck those guys, and I don't spend much more time thinking about them than I do about any other Word in Heaven, by and large. But I mean that Theft and Wind both have edge issues with the central goals of our respective sides of the war. In theory, Hell has a few guiding principles, most of which come down to brute force. Hit it with your mind or your fists, throw more people at the problem, hordes of demons, trample over whatever's in the way, you know. All that. But Theft is built around being fast and sharp-eyed and not sticking around long enough to actually punch any of the angels who might be in the way. It doesn't always work out like that, but it's the ideal.

And Heaven? They're supposed to be the careful ones, far-sighted, planning out what they do for the sake of long-term goodness and you know the drill. But Wind? They're a bunch of thieves for God, and they go beyond that to smash and twist and fuck with things just to throw a little chaos into the world. They're as weird about being angels as War is, and damned if I ever figured out why Heaven thinks it can hold any moral high ground when it has an entire Archangel devoted to making hapless conscripts stab each other for the sake of their rulers' territorial ambitions.

I digress.

What I'm saying is that I walked into my room one afternoon and knew instantly that something had changed, but couldn't work it out for a full minute of feeling like I was slowly going mad for not being able to pinpoint the difference. The ups and downs of being hypersensitive to environmental shifts that might mean danger, I guess. Back when I was working for Fire, I never would've noticed in the first place, and if I'd noticed, I wouldn't have cared.

Turns out that now I care. I'm not quite sure what to do about that.

I track down Giovanna; she's doing prep for dinner, and does not look at all as if she wants help. (I would help, if she asked, or even vaguely implied that the help wouldn't be unwelcome. There's something very soothing about breaking down vegetables, given the knife and board. If I were working with anyone else in the company I would probably already be a better cook.) But she pauses all the same to wait for my instructions. Pointedly.

There's probably no way I could've arranged to be on better terms with Zabina's servant, except by picking a male Role and not being as cracked as I was when I arrived. And even then I'm not sure it would've helped much. If I were an Impudite, I'd try to fix the problem now, but I'm not, so I flash a quick smile at her like I don't notice how much she doesn't want to talk to me, and say, "Landscapers were by today?"

"Yes," she says. "While you were out." She tucks her wrist against one hip, spoon held away from her immaculate apron. "Is there anything I can help you with?"

Instead of saying something sarcastic, I smile brightly at her, and leave. Being polite doesn't help, but why be an asshole without a good reason?

I end up standing outside in the garden, staring up at my own window. It's a place I've stood often enough before, if usually not for longer than it takes to judge the distance between myself and the branch that used to be directly above my head. There's a fresh scar along the trunk of that pine, sap-coated like a scabbed wound. Easy enough to get up the tree without it; there are plenty of other branches, and one route to the roof is easier without that one lying in the way.

A fat little brown bird, probably some kind of sparrow but I've never been one for ornithology, lands on a lower branch and peers down at me.

"You have a very suspicious mind," I tell it. "And aren't you generally supposed to stay out of our garden? Unless you wanted me to go call Zabina."

The sparrow manages to look embarrassed. I should be the one making that expression; it's not completely appropriate for me to let on how easy it is to tell when the local Kyriotate of Trade is spying on our property, but I'm a little annoyed right now and not in the mood to pretend ignorance.

"Well?" I say, and watch it pointedly until it flies away. So just snooping, not setting up a meeting. Probably for the best. I'm in a mood that is not suited to delicate political negotiations right now.

The Kyrio could still be watching, from an animal I haven't spotted yet, but I give up on worrying about that, and climb the damn tree. Easy enough even in this shorter vessel. As always, the loss of reach is made up for in the ease of bending myself through tight places. I end up sprawled out on a larger branch, where I can look at the scar of the one that was taken away.

It's ridiculous, really. It's a _tree_. The landscapers have come and gone, doing exactly what they're supposed to, which is to take care of this whole enormous mess of a garden that none of us who live here want to bother with. (I think Giovanna does some watering, or at least turns an automatic system on periodically. She does a lot of things around the house that I don't notice the details of.) One branch gone because it threatened a window or had some rot in it or was pulling the trunk sideways. The usual.

The first night I was in that room up there, that branch went scratching across the window with its needles, and I kept circling back to that. The sound and the movement, and how neither had anything to do with me. It was just...environmental. Completely neutral. A reminder that the world is bigger than me and a great deal of it doesn't actually care about me, even when it can look, from a certain angle, like something is trying to reach inside toward me.

And now it's gone. And it doesn't matter any more than it did before, which was not at all.

All sorts of things look solid and eternal from the outside. Jobs and buildings and Superiors and mountain ranges. Look at what happened to the people in the company, when they believed their Marquises would be around forever. Look at all those Princes who've been eaten or killed or imprisoned, over the millennia, and an Archangel or three along with them. Nothing is big enough to last forever, and nothing is small enough to escape unscathed.

My phone chirps. I have two, these days, one for each vessel. The one for Rachel is tiny and sleek and has an attached charm that Yuliang bought me when she was visiting the Japan division; the one for my male vessel is cheaper, bulkier, and in a case that can demonstrably survive a 30-meter drop. Tiny vessel, tiny phone, and a one-word message from Giovanna reminding me what time dinner is being served tonight.

"You'll be fine," I tell the pine tree, never mind that it's ridiculous to talk to plants. "We all keep going one way or another. Until we don't. And once we don't, no point in worrying about it, right?"

I pat the tree on the branch, and drop back down to the ground. I have a whole page of Chinese characters to study before dinner. Emails owed to people. Life goes on.


	2. In Which I Do Some Babysitting

Having Guo pick up a host who's not Giovanna is a relief all around. He's getting better at playing people as themselves when he's not trying to push them too hard towards anything, but it was still distinctly not her, and...not-her in a very different way than when the Trade Kyrio from the city uses her body. Call it the uncanny valley of host driving. We get Giovanna delivered back home, and then I sit back in the driver's seat and ask Guo, "What do you want to do?"

"I'm not sure," he says, contemplating his hands. This host is the ex-boyfriend of one of my mortal acquaintances in the city, and not so much of a bastard that it'll take any kind of crime to give him his daily corruption. Just enough of a selfish whiner that I don't mind dropping a Shedite into his head once in a while. He's taller than my current vessel, which doesn't convey any useful information when I'm playing Rachel. Taller than my favorite vessel, let's say, and a sort of washed-out pale that's neither interesting nor so generic as to fade into a crowd. Not someone I would pick if I were trying to take Guo house-breaking.

"Well, pick a thing," I say, "because we have six hours until dinner, and that's going to be etiquette lessons from Zabina. Followed by whatever other lessons she decides you really need to work on while you're here."

"Usually I can just go with what my host knows, when it comes to eating," Guo says plaintively. "Why do forks matter?"

"Forks matter because some people who control a lot of resources believe they matter." I start the car again, and pull out of the garage. Giovanna's already vanished back into the house. (Conversations I will never have with her: what it's like to have a Shedite in your head, when you know it's happening.) "And you're not always running your host as themself, but as the version of that person who gets things done that you want done. So if your host doesn't know table manners, but needs to, that's your job."

"It's like learning how to do gang politics all over again," Guo says, "isn't it?" He twists around under his seatbelt, knees pointing toward me. "The, uh, what do you call them. Markers? Signs?"

"In-group markers."

"Those!" Guo stares out the windshield. "Yuliang told me all about them, a few times, but I'm not always great at remembering things. There's just so much to remember on the corporeal."

"Not that much more than in Hell."

"No, but that's different," Guo says. "In Hell, everyone can see what you are, so it's, uh, limited?" He holds his hands up a few centimeters from each other. "It's like walking down a road. And here it's like trying to walk through a forest. Even if the forest is smaller than the, uh, city?"

"Point. Which is why you learn forks."

"Forks," Guo says, and sighs. "Can we do something that isn't about forks today?"

#

Beer doesn't involve forks. That's enough to keep both of us happy. I park the two of us in a corner of a beer garden that's just mediocre enough to be half-full instead of packed this afternoon, and pull the chairs around the table so that we can watch the rest of the people without being too obvious about it.

Guo picks up a sausage dubiously. "He doesn't like this type," he says.

"Allergic?"

"No, he just doesn't like it." The Shedite takes a bite. "Things taste a little different, depending on who's eating them. Different...body chemistry, I guess? But I disagree with hosts a lot, so it can't just be based on that. What defines why someone likes the taste of a thing?"

"I don't know. What defines why you like the taste of something?"

"I just do or don't," Guo says. "Or sometimes I start out not being sure which way, and then I either get to like it better, or I get to dislike it, uh, worse."

"Then it probably works the same way for them. You don't like your beer?"

"Usually I don't drink." He sips his beer even more cautiously than he nibbles his sausages. I would've thought he'd be more used to corporeal food by now. "People seem to like it, but it doesn't seem to have a lot of purpose. It gets in the way of thinking straight, or acting fast, and it costs money on top of that. What tastes good enough to be worth all that?"

It depends on how much you don't want to think about something. But that's not a useful answer for him. "It's not all risk and reward," I say instead. "Humans seek pleasure. Sometimes their definition of pleasure is weird, or they have strange ideas about how to get to it, but they go after that as much as you or I pursue the things natural to us."

"Corruption and destruction," Guo murmurs. He stares at his beer at moment, then hooks an arm over the back of his chair as he looks out towards the humans seated across the stretch of tables. "And they like the feeling of not being in control?"

"Sure. Some of them. Or the kind of relaxation and lightness some people get from it. Or having a social excuse for speaking and acting more freely than they usually would. And some of them like the taste. Lots of routes to pleasure."

"So what about..." Guo snaps his fingers, trying to find the word. "Monks! Stoics. The people who sit in a stone cell and eat bread and water for thirty years. I've heard about those. What are they getting out of it?"

"What's a Habbie getting out of the scars they carve into their own skin?"

"I have no idea," Guo says. "I've never asked one."

"Well, don't. Bad idea. They'll either get offended, or demonstrate, or lecture, none of which is a barrel of laughs. But pleasure comes from a lot of things. Satisfaction." I grin at him, sharp enough to make him flinch. "Do you like being part of the company?"

"Of course!" He's not quite happy that I'd ask the question at all.

"Nice place to work. People you like hanging out with. All that. But don't you like thinking about how much better it is than other places, sometimes? You see people who don't work there, and think about how much better off you are. And what it means that you were chosen to be there, and _they_ weren't."

"...of course," Guo says, more slowly now. "That's just normal, isn't it?"

"Perfectly normal. Demons and humans both get pleasure out of being distinct from their peers, sometimes. Better than them, however they've decided to define it. A monk in his cell can sit there contemplating his own holiness and self-control and sacrifice, compared to all those people out in the world who aren't getting so close to God as he is, and feel pretty damn smug about it. People can get a buzz out of damn near anything by convincing themselves that they chose it on purpose, and that choosing that way makes them better than the people who didn't."

"Do you?" Guo asks me.

"How normal do you think I am?" I snag a few sausages from the plate, and slouch back in my chair. I like getting some slouching in, when I'm wearing this vessel and Zabina isn't around to see me. Makes the clothes that I'm wearing bother me less. I'm so damn tidy these days, and coordinated as hell. Tonight I should drag Guo along to climb something reasonably simple and see how he does. "Besides, monks are outliers. Humans don't go to extremes as often as we do. But they tend to have more variety than any given Band does. I suppose it's a trade-off that way. You'll find that most humans pride themselves on things they're not actually that different in, whatever they think. They're not very good at conceptualizing large groups of humans as individuals, so if they're about average in their social group, they'll read it as superiority half the time. You should see the stats on the number of people who think they're above-average drivers."

"More than fifty percent," Guo says, "right?"

"Right."

He taps his fingers idly on the table, and has another cautious sip of beer. If I were watching him for more than a few days, I'd try to introduce him to a wider variety of alcohol, but god knows what Yuliang's rules are for him back home. I don't want her accusing me of, ha, corrupting her Shedite.

"I'm not very good at math either," Guo concludes. "But I know that I'm not good, so that counts for something, right?"

"Knowing what you don't know is often more useful than knowing things in general."

Guo mouths that phrase a few times before he finally asks, "Why?"

"Because you can't cover security gaps you don't know exist. Except by throwing more resources at things, which tends to have its own problems."

"More points of failure as you involve more people," Guo says promptly. He's not the sharpest crayon in the box, but he pays attention to the lessons people give him. And Yuliang, who's been giving him lessons for a while now, is a damn good Thief in her own right.

"Among other things. False sense of confidence for having piled enough money into a system or a barrier. Drawing more attention because if you're spending that much on protection, what's inside has gotta be good, right?" I reach for a sausage, but pause when I see the waitress stalking our way. "Incoming. Smile and don't say anything."

"What?" says Guo.

I flash a smile of my own at the waitress. "And what can I do for _you_ today?"

She jerks a thumb towards Guo. "Really? This is what you're doing with your human friends? This?"

I resist the urge towards an insouciant slouch. That's more appropriate to my other vessel, and definitely not appropriate to this Role when I am, to all appearances, having a chat with an unusually testy waitress. "This is Ulrike," I tell Guo. "She's our friendly local Kyriotate of Trade, emphasis on 'local' rather than 'friendly' at the moment, and I think she's taking your presence personally." I turn back towards the Kyrio. "Point the first, that asshole isn't my _friend_. Point the second, no one is going to run around drop-kicking babies, here. Three days of mild incivility, and we all move on."

"That's a Shedite," Ulrike snaps, though she has the sense to keep her voice low, and her body language pleasant enough--at least for people who can't see her face--to not draw attention. "I thought you had standards."

"And you're a Kyriotate," I point out, "but I still talk to _you_. Seriously. We know from subtle, back home."

"You're different," Ulrike says. That is one unhappy Kyriotate, and probably I ought to refer all of this back to Zabina, but I really think I can handle one social disagreement in public on my own. "That's a Corrupter."

"He's a _kid_. And exactly as demonic as I am." Of the three people at this table, I am completely confident that Guo's not the most dangerous. "And, like you, he has to hang out somewhere when he's on the corporeal."

"Then he shouldn't be here at all."

"As I understand the party line to be, back where you live, neither should any of us. And yet." I spread my hands, and give in to that slouch I'm wanting. "Come on. Are you really enough of a bastard to wish infinite, inescapable Hell on anyone?" I pause, but not long enough to let her answer. "Or more to the point, would you rather have him in this city where you can keep an eye on him, or _anywhere else_?"

Ulrike sets a hand to her hip. "Sometimes," she says evenly, "I really wonder about you."

"And I know someone who could answer all your questions, but it'd cost a fortune. So I wouldn't recommend that."

"I'm keeping an eye on you," she says, and I'm not quite sure which of us she means.

"Please do. Send me a text message, or a bird, if he falls down a well."

Ulrike rolls her eyes, and stalks away. By the time she's passed three tables, the body's back to its usual consciousness, and no doubt some small animal is taking over the surveillance.

"I only did it the once," Guo says plaintively.

I blink at him. "What?"

"The thing with the well. I was learning how to work bodies."

I pat him on the shoulder. "Don't worry," I say, "there aren't a lot of those around here. Tell me about how you got out?"

A lark settles on a branch overhead, while Guo starts his story. I wiggle my fingers at it, and...did you know larks can look disgusted? It's sort of impressive. Probably I ought to text Zabina about this kind of thing. But I'm not expecting much trouble. If the war was going to blow up in this city, it would've done so well before I showed.


End file.
